


Third Year

by aliceofbattenberg



Category: ER (TV 1994)
Genre: Family, Medical School, Prequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:21:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27461869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliceofbattenberg/pseuds/aliceofbattenberg
Summary: This is the year when you don the white coat and create the role you will inhabit for the rest of your life--the doctor.
Kudos: 3





	Third Year

How wonderful it would be to be able to fly. Not even to be able to fly  _ somewhere _ , she would settle for the feeling of weightlessness and joy that must come with leaving the Earth and floating, supported by the air.

Her wish to fly felt like a dream that had always been inside her, somewhere, as one instinctively longs for the warmth of a fireplace at the end of a chilly day or the comfort of a parent’s embrace. Even now, she could picture in her mind the hawks that soared above her childhood home in the Kenyan highlands, and the Canada geese that flew south in sprawling V’s over her family’s home in Michigan. She could lie on her back and watch those birds forever, sometimes closing her eyes and feeling the breeze across her body and imagining that she, too, was gliding through the clouds, untethered from the weight of gravity.

While some of the neighborhood boys had taunted the little swifts and sandgrouse that nested in their schoolyard’s trees with slingshots and sticks, Kerry had drawn them and photographed them, as they pecked through the grass or flew from tree to tree. When she had been even younger and even more imaginative, she used to run down hills as fast as she could, taking long leaps with her crutches, to feel like she was flying just like them.

Of course, lots of people must wonder what it might feel like to fly through the open air. But her wish had always felt special to her, a kind of awe God had given just to her. In many of her dreams she achieved her wish--for as long as her REM cycles allowed her, she could be weightless and graceful, easily flying above her neighborhood streets, or above waterfalls, or above the mountain lakes of her childhood.

These days, as an adult living in downtown Chicago, her opportunities for those flight-like moments were mostly limited to her breezy walks along Lake Michigan or her laps at the university pool. (Swimming being flying’s vastly inferior water-based analog.) For those animals destined to a life without wings, though, she thought driving fast down the highway with the windows down was probably the next best thing.

Driving in her little Chevette, the wind ripped through her shoulder-length red hair and beat on her sunglasses. With the sunroof open and her windows rolled all the way down, the lake breeze flooded the car as she passed over one of 196-North’s many bridges. She glanced at the speedometer. 78… 77… That’s a little fast, even for her. She should probably slow down, but she can never get enough of the thrill she gets when flying along the wide, open highway. It has only been 140 miles since she left the oppressive, asphalt-magnified heat of downtown Chicago in June, and the wind blowing through her car already feels so much fresher, more natural, somehow.

She looked to her left at the cool blue water of the Kalamazoo River, at the hundreds of trees lining its banks. After two years in medical school, Chicago had started to feel more comfortable and familiar, but there would always be something about the Michigan waterways that told her she was almost home.

She let her arm rest on the car door, tapping along to the beat of her new Crosby, Stills, and Nash album. She began to sing along, grateful for the chance to play her music more loudly than she ever dared with her roommates or apartment neighbors around.

Kerry savored these few hours of flight. They gave her a sense of deep, physical relaxation, the kind of tranquility that lets your whole body and the world around you just flow. She savored the freedom of this vacation, for once without any chapters of Harrison’s  _ Internal Medicine _ or pharmacological mechanisms or anatomy structures on her never-ending mental to-do list. It had been a long time since she hadn’t had a single thing that she  _ should _ have been studying. She had taken Part 1 of the US medical licensing exam two days ago, and having just finished that singularly brutal 8-hour mental battering, she was driving up to Michigan to spend a week with her mom before going back to start her third year of medical school, her first year as a medical student on the wards.

She pulled off the interstate and turned left, onto the highway that ran along the western edge of town. She remembered how she had once marveled at this paved, flat, perfectly straight highway the first time she had seen it. Where she had grown up, in a small town in western Kenya in the 1970s, the roads built by the government contractors were usually poured in such haste that they seemed to roll out along the hilly land like a carpet rather than cutting through it in flat asphalt grids. For her dad, though, a civil engineer who had decided to retire from his Army Corps of Engineers post to lend his services to the Kenyan government’s rural development initiative, those roads that traced the mountainous countryside like shaky pencil lines were beacons of progress and opportunity.

When Kerry was a little girl, sometimes, on mornings when his crew would be breaking ground on a new construction site, her dad would rouse her hours before sunrise so she could be there to see him coordinate the asphalt trucks, steamrollers, gravel layers, and detonators with all the confidence and mastery of a symphony conductor. After suiting her up in her very own hard hat, he would lift her up onto his solid shoulders and show her around as he surveyed the site and checked in with every member of his crew. Some of the men would protest when he double-checked the blueprint and asked them to shift the guide ropes ever so slightly to match his plans. Week after week, though, they continued to bid to be on his team, because he was meticulous about following the regulations that kept them safe in a brutal, sometimes dangerous, job.

She used to love seeing her dad in his element like that. In his free moments, he would explain the geology and chemistry that helped him make decisions as the pour progressed. ‘Always tunnel through sandstone but bore into bedrock,’ she remembered to this day, although that wisdom probably had minimal utility in her life now besides a stretched analogy to orthopedic surgery. After visiting her dad, the next week at school she would often play with her friends by building roads and bridges with the dirt and sticks they found around the neighborhood.

At the end of one of those days at the construction site, he would lift the sweaty hard hat off her head and hoist her onto his hip. Together they would look over the day’s progress from the command site that sat overlooking the valley. He kissed her forehead and traced the length of road with his finger. “You see all that? These roads are bringing the future, Ker.”

Those were the things that came to her, anyway, when her mind wandered as she flew down the Michigan highway. Her memory--her dad, that valley, his too-tan freckled hands, his proudest smile--suddenly landed in the present moment, and she forced herself to swallow and focus on the music again before her feelings could too deeply catch hold. She couldn’t bear to show up and greet her mom with red-rimmed puffy eyes and a voice hoarse from crying. She wouldn’t let herself be the one to make her dad’s absence even more painfully obvious than it already was.

Soon, Kerry made her final turn, a right onto Shore Drive, the wide road that followed the banks of Lake Macatawa. Her mood began to lift as she started to see the familiar homes of family friends and neighbors, and the occasional decorative anchors and life preservers on their lawns that showed the neighborhood’s enthusiasm for everything nautical. Just about every home on the lake side of the street had a dock with a dinghy or sailboat tied to its cleat. Those that were currently empty undoubtedly housed boats that were currently out for a prized summer day of sailing.

Her parents had found this neighborhood twelve years ago when they moved back to the States from Kenya. The move, spurred by her dad’s ailing health, was not entirely voluntary for any of them, so they cherished the freedom to be able to pick their dream home. They each submitted a criterion, and wherever the three requests intersected (within reason) they would make their new home.

Kerry had been the one to ask if they could move to Michigan. Both of her parents had grown up there, her mom in the college town of Ann Arbor, and her dad in a small town on the rural Upper Peninsula. Michigan was the setting of so many of the stories her parents had shared with her over the years--the story of the first time they met, at the University of Michigan computer center; their summer dates going cherry-picking; their wedding at her dad’s uncle’s farm; their many years as a family of two in Ann Arbor before they had adopted her. Africa had been Kerry’s only home that she could remember, and the move felt like she was a tree with its roots being torn out of its soil. At least, if they went to Michigan, she figured, she could replant her roots in a place that had once been her family’s home.

Kerry’s mom also had a fairly easy request. She wanted to live in a town big enough to have a need for a math teacher. As a younger woman, she had worked as a computer programmer during the revolution from analog to digital computing. After their move to Kenya, she had found a use for her mathematical brilliance as a teacher at the local Christian school. Teaching ended up being the perfect way for her to serve the community, and she found that she loved teaching kids of all ages. As long as the town had at least one school and at least one Protestant church, she would be happy.

Kerry’s dad was the one who ultimately brought them to the banks of Lake Macatawa and Holland, Michigan. Serving as a Navy engineer in the Second World War had left him with a lifelong appreciation for boats and the joy of spending a day on the water. For the past few years, his sight and dexterity had been deteriorating from diabetes that his doctors struggled to treat. At least, if he couldn’t work, he could spend his days fishing, sailing, and working on boats. He had reached out to an old friend from his Navy days, who had found work as a manager of the marina and shipyard in Macatawa when he left the service. Now, his friend owned the place and he thought the small lake town would be just what the Weavers wanted. He had been right.

Their two-bedroom white-paneled farmhouse sat on the lake side of the street between a summer cottage and a two-story home with blue shutters. To the left of a wooden mailbox with ‘The Weavers’ in stenciled letters, there was a gravel driveway leading up to the garage. 

Kerry pulled her car in and was working on closing the sunroof when she heard her mom coming her way.

“Kerry! You’re here!” her mom called out, in a tone that showed her beaming smile before Kerry could even see her face. Kerry finished securing the latch and stepped out of the car just in time for her mom to wrap her in a tight hug. She wrapped her own arms around her mom’s small frame and closed her eyes for a second to savor the moment. “Oh, Kerry,” she said, ending the hug with a final squeeze, “I’ve missed you so much. And now we have so much to celebrate! You’re finally done with that wretched exam. I’m just finishing things up for your party.”

“Party?”

“Oh, I was sure that I told you--” her mom said, breaking eye contact.

“Uhh, you know that you didn’t!” Kerry said, starting to laugh when her mom flashed her a little grin as she started to walk back towards the house.

“Get yourself settled!” her mom called back, “there’s lots to do!”

Kerry turned back to grab her duffel bags and her crutch out of the hatchback and made her way through the living room and down the hallway to the first door on the right, her old bedroom. Each time she returned, the room seemed less and less hers; this time, the pile of ‘stuff without a better place to store it’ in the corner had been given about 20 copies of an Algebra textbook and a couple of old fishing rods.

Otherwise, the small room was much as she had left it when she’d finished her move to Chicago. A twin bed along the far wall hugged the windows that had a perfect view of their dock and the lake. Most of her keepsakes were now in her apartment, but a few remained--her quilt, with a deep blue fabric and layered with the constellations of the Northern and Southern hemispheres, she had been sent by her grandmother for her fifth birthday; the picture of her high school senior year swim team; and the painting her dad did of their family on his sailboat, which seemed to belong here more than in Chicago, here where it could look out the window and over the lake.

Kerry sat down her bags, slipped off her tennis shoes, and sat down on the bed to stretch for a minute before joining her mom in the kitchen. She lay back on the quilt, pulling her knees up to her chest one at a time. She breathed through the ache in her hip and back that intensified as she pulled her leg up.

Distracting herself, she began to wonder who her mom had invited to the party and what, exactly,  _ was _ the traditional way to celebrate one’s daughter completing a medical licensing exam. Certainly, there wouldn’t be a sheet cake with “Congratulations! It’s a med student!” in blue icing. Right?

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into my headcanon and this extensive exposition. I haven't posted fanfic since 2013 but it has been so exciting to witness this renaissance of ER fanfiction, especially for my OG bae, Kerry Weaver. I'll try to bring some of my real-life medical student experience to give us all a story of what her first months in the hospital as a medical student on the wards might have been like.


End file.
